


Jumping From the Chair She Sat In

by spuffyduds



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-30
Updated: 2009-11-30
Packaged: 2017-10-04 00:55:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spuffyduds/pseuds/spuffyduds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a makeshift post-chosen school for Slayers, Giles attempts to set up a poetry course, and gets blindsided by a poem.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jumping From the Chair She Sat In

**Author's Note:**

> Post-canon for the television show; vaguely fits in with Season 8 comics canon.

Giles took it rather personally when he was ambushed by the Oxford Book of English Poetry.

It was one of the few purely frivolous books that he'd permitted himself to keep, in the last few years of endless emergency. It always seemed a selfish luxury to retain such volumes, when he and the children were packing up a library full of books that could save their lives, save the world; volumes of witchcraft, vampire histories, demon lore, wearily rescued again and again from bookburners, from giant snakes, from mystical sinkholes.

But always, placed guiltily in one of the cartons of occult practicalities: "And Now We Are Six," inscribed by his mother on his sixth birthday; "The Wind in the Willows," presented by his father on the occasion of his departure for boarding school, age eight. And this one, this poetry book that had always been a pleasure and a comfort, but was now a Judas, leaving him shaken and sick, sitting in the makeshift library of their latest makeshift Slayer Central.

He'd been sitting in the old sprung armchair, thumbing through the book, taking notes, trying to put together a quick basic poetry course for the slayers.

And yes, that was inherently ridiculous. A frippery in the midst of their more-than-important work. He'd begun with a much more practical idea, the hiring of tutors for every subject in which so many of the young ones were criminally unschooled. He'd been sketching out a curriculum: chemistry and physics and world history, in addition to the demonology and weapons training that the girls already took.

And then he'd looked up one day at a returning war party, a war party of teenage girls. Bruised and bloody and fewer than when they left, and saw—-what they _needed_ was frippery. Bugger the chemistry and physics; these girls needed the beautiful and inessential; these girls deserved their pudding when they hadn't eaten their meat.

So—-a poetry course. And not one he demanded that they all take—-strictly voluntary. He'd been astonished and pleased when twenty-seven of the girls signed up for it. At first he thought he must be impressing them with his teaching methods during weapons training, and then it occurred to him that adolescent crushes might play a part. Then he tried to sort out whether it was more outrageously egotistical to assume that he was a good teacher or, as Buffy would say, a "crushee." Then he sighed, gave up on that pointless internal argument, and went to find his trusty Oxford.

Which ruthlessly turned on him. Which fell open to "_Jenny kissed me when we met, jumping from the chair she sat in…_"

She hadn't, of course. She had, in fact, fiercely irritated him when they met. Raising her slender hand in the first faculty meeting of the year, to volunteer to "update the library." He'd sputtered something about "timeless" hardly being the equivalent of "outdated," and she'd given him an arch smile and rattled off some nonsense about technophobia, and Principal Flutie had said perhaps they could resolve this later, just between the two of them, because the faculty as a whole needed to move on to the question of banning bubble gum. And the lacrosse coach, whom all Buffy's friends referred to quite rightly as a "skeeve," leaned across the table, and, horribly, said, "Yeah, you two, get a _room_."

Giles had blushed, deeply and scaldingly. He _hated_ blushing.

Later, though. Later, during those brief periods when he wasn't thinking of her as a spy in their camp, when she wasn't unable to look at him without feeling Eyghon in her veins—-in those stupidly, unforgivably short times, there were kisses.

What had they been thinking, to let those times be so short? Buffy, a mere child, faced with a love who should have been an enemy, had had the excellent sense to seize the day. And yes, it turned out badly, horribly, but she'd _done_ it, she'd tried. And he and Jenny, older, supposedly wiser, had acted as if they had all the time in the world to hold their pasts against each other, to touch briefly and retreat to opposing camps, to do it all again and again. He, in particular, who had seen comrades slain before, seen lives cut short, over and over—-how had he let their day slip away, slip into a terrible night when his bed was covered with roses? (There'd been no fresh blood, by the time Angelus had gotten her to Giles' apartment. But he'd apparently been seized by artistic inspiration, and arranged rose petals like a spattering spray from her throat.)

Giles shifted in the ratty armchair, took his glasses off and rubbed them pointlessly with his shirt, didn't look at the poem; but it did him no good, it was in his head now and it was not a helpful thing to have there. He could feel all the thoughts he'd been pushing away since the death of Sunnydale, coming back now: whispering imps that would drag him down, make him useless to Buffy, to them all. Not that she trusted him now, really; not that she'd ever quite forgiven him for Spike.

But, usually, he could be a help. Not a mentor any more, not a father ever again, but some sort of help.

Or so he'd told himself. But now his head echoed with, "Say I'm weary, say I'm sad, say that health and wealth have missed me…say I'm growing old," and he _was_. All of those—-old and tired, and he'd torn something in his back during the last battle at the high school, and he was beginning to have hearing loss from--_how_ many concussions, over the years? How much longer could he be any use at all?

He put his glasses back on, stared blankly at the peeling and mildewed wall. He might as well just sit here forever, for all the good he could do, with his wrecked body and his stupid poetry. And he did sit, for a long time, until he was half-dozing and another memory drifted into his head, one he'd tried not to think about because it was too sweet, too painful.

 

One of those times. When he wasn't stupidly angry, when she wasn't stupidly angry. He'd gone to her classroom shortly after the school day ended, telling himself he needed her to track down a tale of a possessed Walkman on one of her technopagan websites. When of course what he really needed was what he got, Jenny squirming under him on top of her desk. Her hair tickled his face and he could feel her smiling against his lips while he kissed her and kissed her, couldn't stop, would possibly be draped over her kissing her when the students arrived in the morning, didn't really care.

And then someone had knocked at her classroom door. They couldn't be seen from that angle, thankfully, but she gasped, pushed him off her. They stared at each other in a panic. And she must have been as befuddled with lust as he was. Because when he thought about it later, they were both still fully clothed; a bit flushed perhaps, but all they had to do was step away from each other and he was simply a colleague here to ask an innocent question.

Instead she gaped at him for a moment and then _stuffed him under her desk_.

Called out "Come in," and someone walked in and started talking about the waste of electricity of having all the computers in the room on when she was the only one there, and dear Lord, it was Snyder.

Giles passed through panicked and into bored after about fifteen minutes of Snyder's standard rant on the general worthlessness of everyone, most particularly students and faculty. And at that point Giles began to do something most uncharacteristic: he began to tease.

He circled his warm fingers around Jenny's ankle and she flinched, tried to scrape them off with her other foot; he just hung on harder until she gave up.

Snyder was saying something about lemmings. Or possibly lemurs.

Giles ran his hand up, cupped her kneecap. She got a foot up onto his thigh and tapped fiercely; probably Morse code for "I will kill you later."

And then—-he truly didn't know what came over him. But here, in this enclosed space, warm from his body, the scent of her arousal from the kissing, from his hand moving up her leg—-it was concentrated, inescapable, irresistible.

He moved his hand some more, and higher.

And she made an abortive leap, up out of the chair, the tops of her thighs banging into the underside of the desk.

"Miss _Callendar_?" Snyder said.

"Hiccups," she said. "Truly terrible hiccups. I need to go home and, and track down some herbal remedies."

Snyder pontificated for a few minutes on the uselessness of "hippie medicine," and then was, mercifully, gone.

"You are a _rat bastard,_" she said from above Giles. "I am never letting you out from under there."

"I suppose I might as well make myself useful, then," he said, and did.

 

He snapped fully awake in the shabby library with that picture in his head: that smell, the noises she made, the way she slid further down in the chair, pressing herself hard onto his mouth.

Giles smiled and tucked that scene away for later contemplation. He checked his watch; almost time for weapons training.

He closed the book and spoke aloud to the empty room, feeling only slightly foolish, "Say I'm growing old, but add: Jenny kissed me," and walked out to do his job.

 

\--END--


End file.
